DOJ to review music licensing laws

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
The guy who copyrighted "Happy Birthday to You" materializes to collect his royalties.

The guy who copyrighted “Happy Birthday to You” materializes to collect royalties.

The Department of Justice has announced plans to review the rules that govern music licensing companies Ascap and BMI, which remain unchanged since the antitrust investigation that spawned them in 1941. That was six years after some jerks copyrighted “Happy Birthday to You,” now the property of Warner/Chappell Music. If you’ve publicly performed that song since World War II, you owe Warner royalties. If you streamed it on Pandora, though—presumably as part of your Postpone Violent Rampage station—the publisher already got its share, pegged at 1.85% of total Pandora revenues. Ascap and BMI argue that rate is unfairly low, as are the the rules that prevent them from leveraging their power to raise it.

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This misleading Fox News graph is fake

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 17 Comments
A fake chart the internet made to mock Fox News for tricking people

A fake chart the internet made to mock Fox News for tricking people

Miracle Mike Sebba sent me this beautiful graph with the caveat that it might be fake, and sadly it did not really air on Fox News. By “sadly,” I guess I mean “fortunately,” since in theory we are against misleading people. That’s why we’re so angry at Fox. The image above, with its y-axis reversed and crammed into the bottom half of the graph, is a fake issuing from the bowels of the internet. Don’t read too much of that Reddit thread, lest you encounter people who argue that it’s still a downward-trending line “even if you flip the numbers,” plus people who, after they know it’s fake, continue to decry Fox News for airing it. The point is that Fox News tricks people, even if you have to trick people into understanding that.

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Piketty: Inequality returning to 19th-century model

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

If you like totalizing theories of economics the way I do—which is to say, if you like reading descriptions of those theories—you have probably heard about Thomas Piketty and Capital In the 21st Century. The English translation of the 700-page book has been well-received since its publication last month, and Piketty has been interviewed in just about every outlet imaginable, including the New York Times. That one is worth reading, if for no other reason than for his observation that the income distribution that characterized the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when “the top 10 percent of the distribution was full of rental income, dividend income, interest income,” is coming back.

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Shapiro on Colbert’s “vile political blackface”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment

Stephen-Colbert1

If you told me twenty years ago that conservative commenters would one day compare everything to the historical struggles of Jews and African Americans, I would have laughed and gone back to hacky sack. But here we are in 2014, and those right-wing pundits who are not still beating the straw man of political correctness are casting themselves as an oppressed people. Case in point: Ben Shapiro’s argument that The Colbert Report is analogous to a minstrel show. I quote:

This routine, in which Colbert plays at conservatism in order to portray it as unendingly ugly, should be labeled for what it is: vile political blackface. When Colbert plays “Colbert,” it’s not mere mockery or satire or spoof. It’s something far nastier.

Vile, I say—vile! Also, Shapiro put an enormous picture of a white comedian in blackface at the top of his column, because he had to.

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Pittsburgh rappers arrested for lyrics

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments
Jamal Knox, Rashee Beasley and another unidentified person, in a grainy photo with no cutline courtesy of KDKA Pittsburgh

Jamal Knox, Rashee Beasley and another unidentified person, in a grainy photo with no cutline courtesy of KDKA Pittsburgh

Remember when Johnny Cash went to prison for confessing to a Reno-area murder in “Folsom Prison Blues?” I’m joking, of course: Johnny Cash was white. In unrelated news, two Pittsburgh rappers have been found guilty of intimidation of witnesses, conspiracy and making terroristic threats on the basis of a rap video posted on YouTube. Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley are rappers in the same sense that they are adults, which is to say technically. But they did rap about violence against police officers in a song that mentioned two Pittsburgh cops by name. Both were sentenced to prison by Judge Jeffrey Manning, in what the Times calls a nationwide trend of prosecutors using rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials.

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